Top SEM Tips

While there is confusion about whether the upcoming update to Penguin is 4 or 2.0, there is no doubt that a major update is around the corner.  Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, announced that it was coming back in March and, if rumors are to believed, it is still on schedule to go live any day.

Penguin 1 rolled out on April 24, 2012 and affected 3.1% of search queries. By any measure this had a significant impact on various websites and specific industries.  Cutts has gone on record saying that this update to Penguin (which they refer to internally as Penguin 2.0 but the SEO community counts as Penguin 4) will be “more comprehensive and go deeper” than the original Penguin.

The goal of Google’s webspam team is to improve the quality of search results for the end user. This means recognizing websites that are authorities for that query and that provide unique and valuable information.  Spammers or Black Hat SEOs attempt to fool Google into putting their results first so that they siphon off the traffic for high volume search queries and translate that traffic into profits.

Each of the major Google updates, whether Panda or Penguin or all the way back to Florida, attempts to counteract specific problems in the search algorithm that have been successfully manipulated by spammers.  The ideal result would be better search results. The actual result is that countless companies and brands find their websites disappearing from the search engine results pages (SERPs) and losing customers by the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands.

When it comes to the next Penguin update, webmasters can expect the following:

• Changes targeted to improving queries such as “payday loans,” porn queries, and other queries that are contested by spammers as highly profitable.
• Penalties for or devaluing of advertorials, paid content designed to pass as regular articles.
• Blocking paid ads or paid content that attempt to pass PageRank in violation of Google’s quality guidelines. Said guidelines require “clear and conspicuous disclosure” of paid status.

The update will also attempt to address honest sites that were negatively affected by previous updates. Since the Google algorithm isn’t perfect, it sometimes penalizes legitimate sites by mistake. As currently planned, Penguin 4 will try to soften the impact on true authority sites due to improved signals for recognizing site authority.

Of course, Penguin 4 won’t be the end of the updates.  Google is constantly working on new improvements and rolling out minor and not-so-minor changes.  According to Cutts other changes in the works for summer 2013 include more sophisticated link analysis, better communication tools for webmasters, and improved hack site detection.

Pretty awesome, but still not as fast as Formula 1

They just suspended one of our sites without warning. It’s paid until June. It has very little traffic so can’t be overusing resources. Seriously, CoolHandle.com, if there’s something wrong on the site (used as spam gateway), a warning email first would allow the issue to be addressed. As it is if there is something going on then I can’t fix it as the site is down.

Another host on my ‘don’t use’ list.

I’ve been reading some good things on the New Chapter supplements including Zyflamend Whole Body especially with the natural Cox-2 inhibitor, with the other Cox 2 inhibitors getting taken off the market perhaps a natural one would work best?

They also have Zyflamend Prostate, Zyflamend Breast, Zyflamend Heart which include the same benefits.

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A user reported they couldn’t leave comments and got this error:

Error 403

We’re sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for /wp-comments-post.php on this server.

You do not have permission to access this server. Before trying again, close your browser, run anti-virus and anti-spyware software and remove any viruses and spyware from your computer.

Your technical support key is: 446e-6a26-b40c-8ddc

You can use this key to fix this problem yourself.

If you are unable to fix the problem yourself, please contact >webmaster at sitename and be sure to provide the technical support key shown above.

This looks related to Bad Behavior plugin as the technical support link goes to ioerror.us. The fix I found was to install WP-Ajaxify-Comments which made the commenting much nicer and fixed this issue.

More information on the new Formula E electric race car system from CNN

Had an issue with one site these past couple of weeks where a Google Analytics experiment was not collecting data even though Google Analytics was saying it was set up correctly.

One of the issues noted elsewhere was that the site set up for cross-domain tracking. For instance if the main site was www.topsemtips.com and the completion (sales) page was on secure.topsemtips.com then you have to set up analytics to know the two sites are interrelated using code similar to:

pageTracker._setDomainName(“topsemtips.com”);

Which some one else mentioned needed the additional code

Added above the experiment code. However this didn’t work. What I did find mentioned in Use Cross-Domain Tracking in an Experiment is that _setAllowHash needs an extra flag. Looking into this further that tag is deprecated from GA and is unnecessary – by removing the _setAllowHash everything finally started working.

I’m looking forward to electric race cars in Formula E though might be weird not hearing the noise of the petrol engines as they whizz past. Interesting they are planning to change cars when the batteries run out, would have thought they could just change batteries which would seem a more logical choice if they want the technology to eventually move to standard vehicles.

Also street circuits are  planned, in Formula 1 street circuits tend to be less exciting due to fewer overtaking opportunities, though this year has been an exception – don’t want Formula E to be dull!

More details in this article from BBC News http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19402383

Just had a 3 year renewal invoice for a shared host account from Network Solutions and the cost was $411. We have a number of hosting accounts with many companies and this is one of the most expensive I’ve heard of for shared Linux hosting. I found somewhere to host the site for $22 for two years. This saves $126 per year in hosting – $252 for two years and if extrapolated to 3 years it saves a whooping $378 over three years.

So I moved the site (took less than one hour) and went to cancel the account with Network Solutions. Can’t find anything on their site on how to cancel the account. Found the billing section and there’s no way to turn off auto renew without phoning them (they’re meant to be an internet company – can you imagine ringing Amazon?) I have had to raise a support ticket about how to cancel the account. Four hours later and still no reply. Obviously the extra cost is not related to customer service.

I have many accounts on $1 per month hosts and they give better support than this (wouldn’t wait four hours for a reply to a ticket). So far the new host looks as fast as Network Solutions. I handle my own backups (email them off server for safety) so don’t care if the server is unstable or crashes and I very rarely hear of instability, crashing, broken hardware, etc and we have a number of hosts. I had one account recently that had a RAID array issue, they said not to update the machines while the put in the new drives, they put in the new drives and the site never went down. Don’t remember the cost of this host but it wasn’t more than $3 per month.

The extra costs are not related to usability. NetSol have their own hosting management interface and its a pain to work your way around. I prefer cPanel and that’s the interface on most hosting accounts I use.

It looks like Network Solutions charges this much because they can. Buyer beware.